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As you may or may not know Ren Ren is Chinese version of Facebook so many investors are trying to hop on the bandwagon – since Facebook is the only seriuos competitor to almighty Google in the western world chances are a social networking web site in China will be even a bigger success considering China has 1.3 billion people who share one (mother) tongue.

In any event some of you may be interested in joining in however as you may have noticed www.renren.com is a Chinese web site which does not have English version so registration needs to be done in Chinese. For many people writing Chinese characters is not fun. Many people even don’t have Chinese characters input system active on their computers.

One may say: “Those people probably should not register at www.renren.com if they don’t have any of that”.

That may be true but curiosity often leads to interesting discoveries so for those of you who want to register at www.renren.com here is how you can do it:

1) First go to Google Translate web page.
2) After that copy http://www.renren.com/ into the translation box and click on “Translate”.
3) Open NCIKU web site.

Ok, now you have all you need to go quickly through the registration process.

Here is how you can do it:

Ren Ren main page

What you see above is Ren Ren main page and in the main right section is where you are supposed to enter your e-mail address. Don’t worry about it, just copy web site address from the browser (http://www.renren.com/) and paste it into the Google Translate browser window.

Google will translate for you everything that can be translated on Ren Ren web page. This is how it looks:

Google translation of www.renren.com web page.

Since you can not see everything clearly let’s take a look at a close-up version of the same image:

Close up of Ren ren registration page translated by Google

Under your “Real Name” you have to write your Chinese name, since you don’t have a real Chinese name you will have to Chose one for yourself. Chinese people share relatively small number of last names, you can pick whatever you want, it doesn’t matter however if you pick one of the existing last (family) names your name will sound more realistic. For your first name you can choose any one or two Chinese characters. Chinese people are conservative when it comes to last names but very liberal about their first names. Just copy those three characters into the “Real name” box and you will be good.

As you can see everything is pretty straight forward except for the captcha… yes you are expected to enter those Chinese characters in the captcha box to continue with the registration process.

Please do not resort to despair! This is not impossible even if you don’t speak a word of Chinese. It may take a couple of minutes to get it right but it is definitely possible for someone who doesn’t speak Chinese. Here is how you can do it:

First click on Refresh button until you get a set of Chinese characters which can be easily copied (drawn) into the NCIKU web page.

Then open your browser window where your NCIKU web site was loaded (in one of previous steps) and with your mouse make a drawing of those characters. As you draw each stroke NCIKU will offer a selection of several characters that look like your drawing. When you get the correct one click on it and it will be automatically copied into the box on the left side of the screen. Repeat the process for all remaining Chinese characters in the Captcha.

NCIKU web site - here you can draw Chinese characters.

After that copy all four characters from the NCIKU page into the Renren captcha box and click on the green button at the bottom.

Whew! The most complicated part is over.

This will take you to the next page, first of three more pages (last two pages are extremely easy).

On this page you need to provide info on your work and education

and here is a close-up picture:

Info regarding work and school is requested (to connect you with classmates/coworkers)

Let’s assume you are working at KFC in Shanghai. In this case you choose first offered choice (work) and in the box below you type “KFC”:

This is where you provide information about your employer (KFC for example)

As you can see in the box on the right side of the page are all other people who work at KFC. Since thousands of people read posts at this blog chances are number of employees at Shanghai KFC will further increase

On the third row choose your education (university, high school, elementary school) and the last row is to pick your school (left) and year when you graduated (right).

For example if you entered your birthday as 1980 you graduated from highschool in 1998 or thereabouts. First on the list is Beijing, second choice is Shanghai, after that other Chinese cities.

Once that is done and you clicked on the blue button new page will be show up:

You are asked to enter your e-mail address and password so that they can search your contacts

Much like Facebook Renren also wants to connect you with people in your contact list but this one can be easily bypassed, just click on the “Skip” link in the bottom right corner of the page….

Almost there…

One more screen left:

Click on the green button to upload your photo (you may not be able to find this option later :)

Upload your photo by clicking on the green button under the photo placeholder. You can x-out and add your photo later…

And that is all there is to it!

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